Plex Beta Update – What is coming up?

Plex is a popular media server app which lets you watch your content from your PC or media server wirelessly. They’ve also worked with NVIDIA to get their media server software integrated into the Shield TV itself.

The player software may not be as stable or performant as the Plex team would like, so they’ve started a beta program that anyone can join to test pre-release versions of their mobile and TV app.

What kind of things are happening in the beta? This screenshot below is from a recent changelog. There are several fixes specifically for TV.

Problem – Lack of media info in preplay screen, i.e. resolution.
Answer – Our designer knows about this and is still trying to identify the best place to add this information.

Problem – Lack of considered ‘normal’ FF / RW
Answer – Agreed, we have already agreed internally the changes we want to make. We just haven’t had time to schedule the work.

Problem – Pressing the play key (HDMI-CEC, Harmony, Nexus Player remote) does nothing on posters of movies/episodes/tv shows/seasons.
Answer – Known feature that we haven’t yet implemented. We should be allowing users to skip preplay pages, etc if they hit a “Play” button. The reason it hasn’t been prioritised is that only a few Android TVs actually have a Play button on the remote.

If you are interested in getting involved to help improve the app, you should join the beta at the link above. Having more feedback will help the developers prioritize work and analyze more crash reports, both of which will give users better software.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.